This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every
morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first-
person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third-
person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional
existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we
possess it (or "seem" to, according to some). We can't "compute" the
existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely
3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and
sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the
uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in
TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the "raw feels" of sight, sound,
pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's
happening, including our every thought and action.

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But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to
refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our
behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3-
p perspective? Citing "identity" doesn't seem to help here - the
issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared
behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they
are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p
perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p
world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do
withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just
because C-fibres are firing? But how?
David

I think one idea is that consciousness is connected to language (c.f.
Julian Jaynes) which was originally just another perception - as animals
give and hear warning cries - but with the evolution of culture it
became a way of passing more detailed information, and then of storing
(memory) information and this led to have an internal narrative as a way
of remembering what was important (what you paid *attention* to). Some
evidence for this theory is that when thinking about something, the same
parts of the brain are activated as when perceiving it.

Not very complete, but it's a hint.
Brent
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